Anyone up for breaking a strike?

That's right.

I don't defend strike-breaking, not by any means, but the career-ruining hyperbole early in this thread was silly. This isn't Flint in the 1930s.

If you want to deal with cold shoulders and getting fucked over on a regular basis, if you're found out (though I think few would find out, and others who DID find out won't give a shit if THEY weren't the ones getting directly fucked over), that's your cross to bear.

It'll never be 1930s West Virginia, thank goodness, but it will be stuff like co-workers being intransigent about your needing off days, needling things like that. THAT is something that will dog you for years.

To me, that all falls under "do the crime, do the time" if you choose to be a strikebreaker.

 

Well, shotty, there's a lot of room between cold shoulders and kneecapping. For instance: If I were to become a sports editor, and I found out that one of my employees had been a scab, I would make sure he got just enough of the dogs-licking-their-balls beat to perhaps reconsider his choice of career, or at least his place of employment.

That's an example, off the top of my head, of "worse."

 

Unions often make it easy for people to be lazy and make a lot of money, and, in general, union politics turn off a lot of even the rank and file members these days. However, unions have their place, such as protecting city and state workers. My father was involved in a significant strike more than 25 years ago as a municipal employee, and being old enough to remember what he went through, there's no way in hell I'd ever cross a picket line.

 

Shot, you usually have one of the more reasonable voices on the board. But, again, I have to say, "fuck that." This is a drastically different situation than the Youngstown strike.

Crossing the DN/Inky picket line would be pissing in the face not just of every union member in philly, but ever newspaper journalist who is sick and fucking tired of the corporate bullshit that has seized hold of our industry. It's an affirmation of every fucking robber baron that makes his money capitalizing on our love of journalism while setting fire to the very foundation of our job.

I've never been a crusty union guy. But in this situation, if you were to cross, you would be dead to me professionally. And you'd be dead to enough people who would make enough noise in forums such as this that you'd be dead to a lot of other people as well to whom you wouldn't ordinarily be dead to.

 

I wouldn't cross that particular picket line, daemon ... because I know and respect enough of those people. That, however, wouldn't be the case just anywhere.

And it's fortunately a problem I'll never have to face ... not for about four months now. I wouldn't have crossed a picket line here either, but the possibility has been removed.

And finally, if that issue would make me "dead" to some people, rather than the work I do or the co-worker I am ... then those are people I'd rather not know anyway.

 

Won't ever cross a picket line.

'Nuff said.

 

For those of us who are out of the loop, what caused the strike in Philly? What is the union demanding and what are they being offered? To me, that puts the whole situation into better context and I think it sheds some more light on whether it is a situation where I could appreciate replacement workers or whether it wouldn't be.

I've worked under some lousy conditions at low pay and not complained as much as I should because I do still hold to some idealism about a greater public service being done in this craft, and I feel there is some merit in someone telling Philadelphia's news. The facts behind the dispute would tell me, I think, whether I'd be supportive of the picket, or whether I'd want to see people in there.

 

Fixed.

I've worked in unions twice before (never in journalism) and I appreciate what they can do. Workers of the world unite!

 

I'd like to hear more about specific issues in Philadelphia, too, because that's what matters. Unions aren't what matters.

One of my biggest problems with them is that unionites use the rhetoric of being in some kind of big club. And that's where the can of worms is opened, to me. Why should you, in a newsroom, be getting involved in a dispute over the working conditions of state secretaries? Why should an auto worker be standing on YOUR picket line? Not their fight.

Following unions for the sake of all-encompassing solidarity ... THAT'S a problem. Appreciate what they can do? So do I. I repeat: SO DO I. But don't be blinded by the union label and think that they're all fighting the good fight.

 

If I was local, I'd cross -- but $18 isn't that much without benefits. I can't understand the notion of unions in cases where the employees are of varying skill. It's a lot easier to tell the difference between a good writer and bad writer than between a good steel worker and a bad one. People should be paid according to their skill, not what some group negotiates. It's not like people from non-union papers are working 80 hour weeks for poverty-level wages... oh, wait....

 

And yet you'd help try to break a union shop by crossing. Good for you!

 

I don't believe anyone crosses that line without understanding that there is a sizable contingent in this industry that would never forgive them.

We can all proselytize all we want, but I doubt anyone who's actually contemplating strike-breaking is going to be swayed by message-board rhetoric.